#sgsajsosjd lmao some of this felt weird asf to write but the DR lends itself to that ><

[felassan]

If Morrigan taught Warden how to perform Dark Ritual, would it be possible for female Warden to get pregnant with their LI (even if it was another Warden)? Or is the Old God's soul nescessary to keep the baby alive and such Ritual wouldn't work in the end?

Hi Nonnie! The answer is under a cut for length and sensitivity purposes. 

Huh, interesting question. Do you mean like instead of Morrigan performing it with the male Hero, Alistair or Loghain before the battle so that someone didn’t have to make the Ultimate Sacrifice, could the female Hero instead be the one to perform it with her (Scenario A)? Or do you mean like, in normal everyday circumstances where nobody’s life is at stake, could the female Hero perform it with their LI as a way of overcoming the effects of the Taint on fertility and so be able to have biological children together that way (Scenario B)?

Hard to say I think! The DR wasn’t totally explained and was left quite vague. We don’t really know all that much about it. It’s ancient and mysterious. A couple things:

The DR is old magic from before the Circles of Magi were ever created. Morrigan says some would call it blood magic. If it’s possible for Morrigan to teach others how to perform it, I’d guess that as it’s magic she would only be able to teach it to Amell and Surana. My first assumption would be that it’s not possible for mundanes to carry out the ritual, therefore the pool of which female Heroes would be capable of hypothetically performing the ritual with their non-Morrigan LI is limited.

The methodology of the ritual Morrigan learned from Flemeth. This causes me to wonder if only powerful mages would be able to carry it out. I also wonder about whether there’s some requirement that said mage is ‘special’ somehow, for lack of a better term, like would they need to have [x] trait or [y] background? Would they need to have been brought up as Morrigan was learning non-Circle magic arts from an ancient being, have had that training to have the ability? Would they need to be of Flemeth’s bloodline even? Kieran’s line “Mother is the inheritor, she who awaits the next age” I feel has several meanings. It’s about Morrigan’s general wish to come into possession of and preserve the magics and powers of old, and it’s about how Flemythal had intended to gift Morrigan her soul, had she been willing. It’s foreshadowing that Morrigan may one day drink from the Well and receive all that it entails, and it’s a vaaague asf allusion to the general future of Thedas (packaged with a meta ‘wink nudge, get it, AGE?’ card lol) as a whole in the same kinda vague manner that epic lines like “Change is coming to the world” and “The world fears the inevitable plummet into the abyss” are [~oohhh dramatic ominous noises~, y’know?]. It also brings to mind Morrigan’s DAO plot-arc of having been sent along with the Hero and Alistair in the first place in order to try to ‘inherit’ (poetic use of the word here) Urthemiel’s soul. The inheritor, “This is what I was meant to do”.. sounds a bit specific and predestined-ish. Could all mages who attempt the DR in Morrigan’s place manage to inherit the soul or successfully complete the rite, or are there some special requirements? This is unknown and purely just me speculating about all possibilities.

It was once written in that the female Hero (any female Hero) could be the one to perform the DR with Morrigan and the OGB would still be conceived. This was going to be possible via magic, but ultimately the writers scrapped this idea before the game shipped. So with reference to Scenario A, I don’t see why you couldn’t write/headcanon that the female Hero performed the DR with Morrigan and that as a result Morrigan became pregnant. It’s clearly something the writers were thinking about having be a thing once upon a time, and in this setting we have all kinds of powerful magics that we don’t question, so why not handwave this if you want to.

You could take into account Grey Warden fertility. The Taint decreases a Warden’s fertility and most can only conceive prior to the Joining. On occasion a Warden and a non-Warden can conceive, so you could have, for example, the female Hero and Zevran, say, settling down and having children in the usual manner after the Blight or whatever, albeit probably with some difficulty conceiving and it being a rare/notable thing if they managed to. The sooner they began the better their chances though, probably; Morrigan’s line about Riordan being unsuitable as a candidate because she needs a Warden who hasn’t been tainted for too long otherwise it wouldn’t work was said in reference to the DR, but from the sound of it it seems to imply that the longer a Warden has been tainted for, the lower their already low chances of conceiving are, and that after some timepoint it drops off completely and permanently and is no longer possible at all. Alistair is able to father Kieran about 1.5 years after going through the Joining, and Fiona was able to conceive Alistair with Maric about 1 year after being recruited, so we know it’s possible in the first 1.5 years at least.

Canonically as far as anyone [in-universe] knows, under normal circumstances two Grey Wardens can’t have children together naturally and it’s never happened. On this DG once wrote “just because it's never happened doesn't mean it never could, I suppose. There are always exceptions. [...] So if you involve some mysterious [magic McGuffin in the headcanons/fanfic of the player he was talking to in this exchange]... why not? [...] Unnaturally is an entirely different story.” It’s up to you whether you take on-board or discard this particular piece of canon that they can’t. I stick to it personally, but I can see why some Queen Cousland players, for example, would want their Heroes to be able to have biological children with Alistair and so opt to discard this or write around it.

Now, when a Warden does conceive a child with a non-Warden, the child doesn’t bear the Taint, like the Taint isn’t passed on. So the child of a Warden and a non-Warden conceived in regular non-DR circumstances isn’t in danger from getting or dying from the Taint or anything.

But, something about the way the DR works means that the resulting child would bear the Taint initially. The purpose of the DR was to make an embryonic beacon that the soul of the slain Archdemon would seek out. Some part of the DR ensures the Taint is passed on, because if the embryo wasn’t Tainted it wouldn’t be attractive to the soul and the soul wouldn’t go into it. However, Morrigan’s dialogue about how Kieran won’t be a darkspawn, how she seeks the soul free of the dark forces that corrupted it, and how the child as a result of the ritual will represent freedom for the soul and a chance for it to be reborn apart from the Taint implies that after the soul joins with the embryo, the Taint is cleansed from both. It’s the absorbing of the soul that cleanses the embryo of the Taint. And so, the presence of the Old God’s soul in the equation is necessary for the embryo of a Dark Ritual conception to be cleansed and born free of the Taint. With no Old God soul, you’d end up with a child which has the Taint and is therefore subject to what that can entail, like possible sickness or being linked to the darkspawn hivemind like a Warden or, presumably, eventually the ghoul-like corruption and premature death. I don’t know that any such embryo would even make it to term, really. So in Scenario B, I don’t think it would work like this unfortunately.

Hope this made sense, helped some and was a bit of food for thought. :)

(An aside: Lore discrepancy - Why can two Wardens not conceive together, but eventually after a Blight “Blighted animals will begin to breed again, giving birth to non-mutant [untainted] offspring”? That sounds like it’s saying a Blighted animal could breed with a Blighted animal successfully.)